Getting the best draw number in a contention set is of course not indicative of any skill or of the quality of the applications, it just means the applicant got lucky.

Neither is it an indication of whether the applicant is likely to ultimately win their contention set; myriad other factors are in play.

There may even be some advantages to poorer draw numbers. We’ll get to that later.

Amazon is the luckiest portfolio applicant.

Amazon was the most successful applicant in the Draw of any company applying for 20 or more gTLDs, as measured by average prioritization numbers.

Applicant

Average Priority

Amazon

777

Afilias

878

TLDH

909

United TLD (Demand Media)

910

Donuts

946

Uniregistry

961

Directi (Radix)

994

Google (Charleston Road Registry)

1,050

Famous Four Media

1,222

The average for each applicant is of course affected positively by the number of IDN applications it filed, and negatively by the number of applications for which it opted out by not buying a ticket.

Amazon applied for 11 IDNs, increasing its average score, while Google did not buy tickets for 24 of its applications, substantially reducing its portfolio’s mean priority.

Likewise, Famous Four Media did not buy tickets for 12 of its applications.

Dot-brands fared less well, on average, than open gTLDs.

Single-registrant TLDs (which includes dot-brands and generic strings with single-registrant models, such as Google’s .blog application) had an average priority of 983, compared to 921 for TLDs we’ve identified as having “open” registration policies.

Verisign’s clients did better than most other registry back-ends.

Of the registry back-end providers named in more than 20 applications, China’s KNET fared best, with an average draw number of 328, according to our data. That’s to be expected of course, due to the inherent bias in the process towards IDN applications.

Of the 66 geos, 30 are over 1000. In other words, about half the geos won’t see the light of day until the latter half of 2014 thereafter. Very unfortunate for this group since they have the greatest potential to succeed. No surprise given the history of this initiative.

i would like to see the reverse analysis — of those uncontested non-IDN apps, which ones ended up, for example, with priority <700.

That's really the metric that counts. If I have an uncontested app, I definitely want to go early. If I have a contested one, you can argue I may want to go later, because I would benefit from more time to potentially get a bigger refund.